The pharmaceutical industry will intone its familiar mantra: The cost of drugs is a relatively small percentage of total health care costs; innovation requires investment; research-based companies need to realize an adequate return on investment; and companies often establish access programs for destitute patients.

We all want the telecommunications giants to profit, and they intone corporate social responsibility well, but these kinds of dialogue never reach many people on Chicago's Southside or in Tottenham and Hackney.

Back when people relied on stately anchors to gravely intone the important events of the day, even when the only story that mattered was slowly leaking out of a country that sealed up access to any information.

(Why not just intone The Line, commissar-like, from the podium, signal for applause, or wild applause, or prolonged and stormy applause, and let us out so we can go back to the evening shift at Grommet Factory #234?)

Thus, he is quite at home preaching in the United Church of Canada where he is wont to intone piously on “diversity” and critical approaches to counter racism, sexism, homophobia or other forms of discrimination and oppression.